Solar panels installable on the roof of a home have been available for many years. In the past, these panels tended to be large and thick and were mounted above the traditional shingles of the roof on support structures. Such installations, while indeed contributing to a reduction in domestic electricity bills, were nevertheless considered by some to be unsightly and for this and other reasons, enjoyed limited success and acceptance, particularly in residential applications. Further, installation of such solar panels required specialized installers and substantial electrical expertise to wire the panels together into an electrical grid and to couple them to the home and to the public electrical service.
More recently, solar shingles have been developed as an alternative to roof mounted solar panels. These solar shingles are relatively thin, flexible, and mount to a roof in substantially the same way as traditional shingles. Therefore, they can be installed for the most part by roofing contractors. However, the shingles must still be electrically connected together by wires and connectors into an electrical grid that, in turn, delivers power ultimately to a home's electrical system through an inverter or inverters or other equipment. While solar shingles such as these represent an improvement over old roof mounted solar panels for domestic use, they nevertheless still require interconnection with a grid of wires. The interconnection itself can be quite complicated, requiring the services of skilled electricians. Furthermore, the wires and connectors used to interconnect the solar shingles can become unreliable or disconnected over time resulting in outages or efficiency reduction of the system as a whole.
Transferring electrical power generated by solar shingles without wired connections has been suggested. U.S. Pat. No. 8,035,255 of Kurs et al., for example, suggests the use of a disclosed wireless coupled resonator power transfer technology for this purpose. However, this references teaches that wireless capture resonator devices that couple with source resonators on the solar shingles be mounted inside the building beneath the roof. This approach would be labor intensive and would require specialized expertise and very precise location schemes to align the wireless capture devices in the attic with solar shingles on top of a roof, which are not visible from the attic. Repair or replacement of components also would be cumbersome and time consuming with such a solution. The Kurs et al. patent mentioned above is hereby incorporated fully by reference for its teaching of a wireless coupled resonator power transfer technology useful in the present invention.
A need therefore exists for a system and methodology for capturing electrical power generated by solar shingles that does not require that the shingles be interconnected in a wired electrical grid, that is installable by a roofing contractor without the requirement of special expertise, and that does not result in arrays of electrical equipment located in the attic space of a home. It is to the provision of a system and methodology that addresses this and other needs that the present invention is primarily directed.